Geek Technica

We recently added a twitter account and rolled out a face book page. If you haven’t noticed it or following us, we need you to take a minute to follow us on twitter and be a royal fan on face book.

For the survival of mankind and the future of everything that is geeky. Do it.

Have faith, Geeks will prevail.

To most people an open Wi-Fi access point is gold mine. They don’t think twice before connecting to a Wi-Fi access point and going on their merry ways and surf around the internet. It is just so convenient. But it is also a big risk factor with serious security ramifications. I am not talking about Wi-Fi spots available in Starbucks or similar business outlets, even though they still might have similar security concerns, I am more concerned about open wireless access in your neighborhood that someone forget to secure it with a password.

Such an open access point could be a trap set up by a knowledgeable person with bad intentions, with proper tools they can not only log all your online activities but can also gain access to your email, bank or financial website information that you access to using their internet connection. A smart and capable hacker can hijack your session when you are connected to your bank or email account without actually having username and password for your account. For some sites without proper security measures username and password can be viewed in plain text using a sniffer, as shown below.

(more…)

Officially Chrome OS is following the same versioning trend as Chrome browser. The tarball packed chromium source that was initially released for everyone to build Chrome OS from scratch was 0.4.22.8 and the dev channel (nightly builds) Chrome browser is 4.0.249.11 (as of this writing). But Chrome OS user-string reveals a bit more about the current OS version. I am sure you can get the same information by checking out the source but this is a less time consuming way to find out.

Chrome Browser dev channel user-agent string under Windows 7:

Operating System:    Macintosh WinNT

Browser:             Safari 1.3

                     Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.11 Safari/532.5

Chrome OS user-agent string:

Operating System:    Macintosh UNIX

Browser:             Safari 1.3

                     Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5

Even though the Chrome browser running on Chrome OS seems to be dev builds of the browser, the underlying OS identifies itself as CrOS i686 9.10.0, or more specifically version 9.10. This might have something to do with the fact that Ubuntu developers have been privately working with Google on Chrome OS way before it was officially announced in July 2009.

Taking these information into consideration I think it is safe to conclude that, under the hood, Chrome OS is nothing more than a stripped and dumbed down version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic koala with Chrome browser acting as a light-weight desktop environment (similar to XFCE or xubuntu).

Today Google officially revealed its much talked about OS to the general public. Its not an official release yet and much will be changed in terms of UI and more featured will be added as it gets an official release sometime one year for now. For the time being the project and its source has been opened up to everyone to that developers can contribute to the project. As some of you might now, Google Chrome OS relies on Linux kernel and this will without doubt give a big boost to Linux kernel and all the OS and applications that depend on it. It is fair to say that this is the single most important news for Linux. The advertising and developers muscle of Google is likely to take Chrome OS and Linux a long way forward.

Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian that depends on a lot of open-source software like Host AP Linux drivers, PAM, Syslinux, IBus, ConnMan, XScreenSaver.

(more…)

The only thing that was stopping me from making a full migration to Chrome was the excellent Firefox web developer’s add-on Firebug. Any decent web designer/developer will tell how powerful and time saver Firebug is. Webkit powered browser’s like Safari and Chrome also comes with a built-in web developer’s tool called Web Inspector, which is decent but lacks a lot of great features available with Firebug.

With the recent Web Inspector update, available on webkit nightlies, they just might have one-upped firebug with some great new features. Since both Chrome and Safari runs on webkit, its only a matter of time before this becomes officially available to your webkit powered browser, in the meantime you can use the nightlies to get a taste of the new Web Inspector.

(more…)